Utah For The Win

[Ed. Note:  Google Blogger broke something a while back which now causes variations in the font throughout these articles.  I've fought this with manual html edits for a while, but am just giving up.  Sorry it's not as pretty as it used to be. ]

Since you know I like to focus on the positive in these screeds, let’s start with the less than obvious win.  A week prior to the adventure that spawned this tome, I attended an old friend’s wake.  It was sudden, unexpected, sad, but spurred a reunion with folks I hadn’t seen, in some cases, for decades.  Hours crammed into a very small, very hot, very crowded funeral home full of old farts my age or more, followed by a big group dinner, in the midst of a newsworthy flu outbreak.  Yikes.

Then, air travel to one of my least favorite places, Las Vegas.  A two-and-a-half-day corporate Rah-Rah with four thousand people from around the globe.  Followed by the Utah adventure which you came here to read about – we’ll get back to that, I promise.  Then more air travel, delayed first one day by Snowmageddon, then delayed again and again (POINTS to the airline, I’ve never seen a flight get delayed twice in three minutes!) and then another whole day by a cancelled flight, adding jam-packed hotel courtesy vans, more mobbed airports, and finally home after eight days (and seven time zone changes) of what started as the two-day Rah-Rah… did I mention, in the midst of a newsworthy flu outbreak.  Yikes again. 

And?  Didn’t get sick.  Damn.  For the win.  Two days raspy voice, a bit of nose gunk.  But really. 

Now more wins.  First, Vegas wasn’t as bad as it could have been, even counting the haunted hotel room which was so over-technologied that the lights wouldn’t come on until they rebooted the room (their term, not mine).  Got in some good “I’m still on eastern time so 5 AM isn’t really early” runs in a clime that, unlike our frozen tundra back home, permitted shorts.  We’ll call that a win.  Plus, a nice visit with an old cousin that only happens on these outings.  Another win. 

And the big win.  The luck of timing had a couple friends, one old, one new, planning to run a marathon in southwest Utah the very day after Corporate Employer turned us loose from Rah-Rah.  I don’t think Chris expected anyone to say YOU BET when he posted that he was planning this and invited game souls to join.  For me it was a rescue from a slog to Hell.  Win.

(No, I didn’t win the race, far from it. Forty-third, if you must know, which was funny since my bib was forty-three. And my post-Rah-Rah hotel rooms were four-thirty-three and three-thirty-four. Can’t make this stuff up.) 

Even Snowmageddon made for a win, since rather than high-tailing it back to McCarren Airport, no, wait, they renamed it Harry Reid, right after the race, I pushed my return back a day and scored a day hiking in Zion, always a win.  Yes, the extra day for the cancelled flight ran up the count in the loss column, but that just made the odyssey more epic, and my win-loss record for the week would still have made the playoffs. 

Take the wins. 

Now as for that Utah Marathon thing, the event in question was the Sun Marathon in Santa Clara, Utah, outside of St. George, towns where the concrete in the oldest buildings still hasn’t fully cured.  Apparently southwest Utah has become a haven for California refugees, and the place is growing so fast that they’ve built a new freeway (currently two lanes but landscaped for four) around the east side of St. George through mostly nothing.  Because it’s coming.  It made for an interesting route on my way out of town.

Chris, he being the one I met on my first marathon twenty-and-a-half years ago (yes, I have race shirts that are almost old enough to drink legally), he being the one who goaded me into writing this blog, yes, that Chris, was joining his friend Tim, who’s doing the fifty states thing from his home base in Tennessee.  I’m not and never intend to do the marathon states thing (though I do have to set foot in Alaska before I croak to check off number fifty on the ‘been there’ list), but having been to that corner of the world and knowing how drop-dead gorgeous their rocks are, and let’s face it, I love rocks, well, this was an easy decision.  Utah! 

Chris, by the way, posted a great article and podcast on his version of this adventure, which you can read here… no, wait, I’ll post that at the end, otherwise you’ll click over there now and forget from where you came.  If you’re anything like me.  Distractable.  SQUIRREL! 

So, with less than two months’ warning (read, training), this wasn’t going to be a target race.  This was just going to be a get-the-hell-out-of-Vegas and go for a run in the red rock desert race, call it conditioning for April’s real target race (Cheap Marathon this year, not Boston).  It wasn’t a let’s-requalify-for Boston-race, it wasn’t redemption, it was just fun. 

Who you kiddin’?  First, when do I pay for a race and not at least give it a decent shot, and second, since when is mile twenty-four truly fun, especially if, as in this case, it’s uphill?  Cutting to the car crash as an old co-worker used to like to say, I rolled in what would have been about ten minutes faster than last spring’s Boston if it weren’t for that pesky mile fifteen port-o-john stop, proudly knocked off in a record two minutes.

Why, you might ask, was a pit stop required of the one you know to be so organized as to always manage such things before a race?  Well, because it was pitch black at the start.  Outside the perimeter of a few lights under the fairgrounds pavilion, the start area was pitch black.  The port-a-john area, pitch black.  No moon, either; I’d checked ahead of time.  Using those porta-johns would have, how can we put this delicately, placed one at high risk of uncertain resulting cleanliness.  So, um, sure, I should be OK, I’ll manage.  I hoped.  Nope.  Add two minutes.  But yeah, I still re-qualified, even counting the downhill time penalty that Boston now (rightly) imposes. 

The start of this escapade was in the tiny village, if you could call it that, of Veyo, Utah.  Nobody’s ever heard of Veyo, Utah.  But the world is a strange place, and days later, crammed in the back of that hotel courtesy van, the woman next to me knew all about Veyo.  Apparently, their fame is pies, and that they mush them up into milkshakes on occasion.  Who knew?

Veyo is about forty-five hundred feet up, very dry (I’d come to calling this event the “Dry Run”), and on that morning, cold, and very windy.  Bundled in our thrift-shop finery plus a reused mylar blanket or two (there’s a reason I keep them after races) we huddled around fires small (buckets) and large (fire pit) shuddering against the cold, trying not to set ourselves alight, and watching the wind carry enough embers to easily torch a good part of the surrounding arid landscape.  But races are made for these moments; Chris met up with a gent from Europe who literally recognized his voice from his podcast, and I discovered the young lady next to my inferno was, of all things, a trapeze artist from Australia.  When’s the last time you met a trapeze artist… from anywhere?

But the world is a strange place, and just yesterday Dearest Offspring the Younger told us how she was chatting with a man in Syracuse who’s daughter was, I can’t make this up, a trapeze artist. 

The only way they were able to wrench us from the relative warmth of our pyres was by dousing them with five gallon tankers.  Sir Douser told us as much, “If I don’t do this, you’ll never leave!”.  We shuffled and tripped over rocky, uneven ground to an exceedingly dark place with a starting arch barely visible by the light of the one or two people (of about two hundred kindred souls) who took one for the team and carried a light – since nobody else wanted to haul one for twenty six miles.

Sure glad I’d driven the course the day before and sort of knew what that first mile looked like, since I sure couldn’t see it.

But dawn did break quickly, and by the time we plunged into the canyon to the hairpin, the dramatic landscape was in full view.  I knew we were only four miles in, when a sprint was entirely irresponsible, but I just couldn’t resist the urge to exceed the posted advisory speed of ten, which Garmin more or less claimed I accomplished. Nerd fun.  Time to get back to work.

Click, click, click, go the miles.  Plenty of chatting, till folks spaced out and there wasn’t, and it became more of a lone endeavor.  A big net downhill course, plus a tailwind once we’d made the hairpin, put a little lift in the stride.  A couple of those downhills downright steep.  And scenery, oh, scenery.  I’d expected as much when I signed on, then, admittedly, previewing the course on Google left me less than impressed.  Not to worry.  Google’s cam squishes the enormity of large landscapes to fit them on a screen.  Freed from artificial pixelization, they burst forth into grandeur that captivates even more when experienced on foot.  On a route punctuated by the oddity (for us easterners) of cow catchers, over which the organizers politely provide plywood sheets.  It was about cow-catcher time when it occurred to me that wearing a bright red shirt and running through open range might not have been the best idea.  Toro Toro!

My preview told me I’d deal with an uphill at six.  Duly noted, handled, never cared.  A long gradual uphill at twenty.  Dreaded, but when it came, nothing worthy of note.  A long slow upslope grind at twenty-four, which lived up to grind designation, made worse by an uneven sidewalk and the odd routing of 5- and 10K runners coming right at us (this was one of those race events where they’d run every distance if you’d pay for it).  This was one of those times when you tell yourself there are only two-point-three miles left, and a week or so later you check in and find there are now only two-point-two, but it was made almost enjoyable by the visage of Utah’s version of Ayer’s Rock looming dead ahead in our view. 

But somehow, in my preview I hadn’t even noticed the hill at eighteen, which took me by surprise, and, frankly, hurt. 

C’mon, we live for this shit.  Eighteen hurt, but by then we were blended with the slow half-marathoners, and there’s a dark and evil satisfaction of knowing that even while you’re struggling, you’re thirteen miles further into this than they are and you’re still cruising past every one of them. 

Yep, this would just be a run, he said, not a target race, but it’s just not in me to not lay it out on the course.  And so by the last turn I was thoroughly toasted and truly needed the downhill of the last mile, and I was far enough gone to be unsure I’d get over the ill-placed curb a hundred yards before the end.  Seriously, folks.  Note to race directors:  don’t make marathoners jump off a curb – even downhill – at that point.  The outcome is not guaranteed.

But hey, that’s what you get; this was a bit of a shoestring operation.  Nice people and in the end a good time was had by all, but through a former race director’s eyes, oy vey.  One poor kid left alone to sort out, announce, and hand out awards – to five-year age groups, top three for each, men, women, for four races, with only his phone as a reference, in no order only when he found a category posted – again, by himself.  At one point, sitting behind the entirely disorganized awards table (plaques, gift certificates, and a mix-master of medals since they use previous years’ leftovers, eco-friendly to be sure but yeah, shoe-string), Chris offered the young lad our assistance, and we spent the next twenty minutes trying to satisfy a continuous and random stream of runners seeking deserved awards.  At our first chance, we got out of that business, fast. 

Mayhem ruled, and the grand podium set up to the left of the awards table was completely ignored by said lone, desperate lad, so Chris, Tim, and I stepped up for our own pictures.  First, second, third, meaningless (well, not entirely, Tim took his age group and I nabbed second in mine, so it sort of made sense), whatever. 

On to lunch and the beer.  After which Chris and Tim hot-footed it back to Vegas, while I hung around, blew out of St. George in the dark for a second morning in a row, and hit Zion.

Zion is one of my favorite places on Earth, and that day alone could fill another blog post, but you’re tired by now.  Stories of marathons are by definition marathons.  I’ll suffice to say that it was glorious, amazing, filled with wonderful people met on the trail, and, I admit it, another kind of dark and evil satisfaction to know I could slog up twelve-hundred-plus feet to the ridge above Scout Lookout (actually, GPS, which can’t handle the signal echoes of canyons, said I scaled vertical canyon walls and climbed over eleven thousand feet and attained one hundred seventy seven miles per hour!), just shy of the notorious Angel’s Landing (which I will never do, I’m a chicken!) the day after a marathon. 

Another win.

Oh, and here’s Chris’ post.  Now you can go read it.  https://runrunlive.com/sun-marathon

I leave you with one of my favorites of the six thousand or so pics from Zion, or at least it seemed like that many...